Australian Politics Forum

IN his new memoir Kevin Rudd reveals his vision for Australia when he became PM: “Julia [Gillard] and I now shared a common project, which was ridding the country of Howard and all his works.”

Well, if they succeeded at nothing else, Rudd and Gillard were champions at wrecking Howard’s legacy, trashing the nation’s finances and confidence for at least a generation.

They blew Howard’s surplus on pink batts, school halls and $900 cheques to dead people. They dismantled border protection and packed the electorate with armies of new Labor-voting welfare recipients.

They embedded poison pills in future Coalition budgets: the $50 billion white elephant of the National Broadband Network famously devised on the back of a beer coaster; the annual $22 billion welfare leviathan of the National Disability Insurance Scheme; billions on the Gonski education package for no discernible benefit; child care reengineered to suit unions which sent costs skyrocketing for families.

But Rudd’s crowning glory was dysfunctional climate policy of the last decade. Climate change in his hands became the “great moral challenge of our time” and in 10 years Australia has gone from having almost the cheapest energy in the world to among the most expensive.

Rudd destroyed the model of low cost coal-fired power that had underpinned our prosperity. And all for nothing. We could have shut down the country and lived in caves for the past decade for all the difference it would have made to the climate.

Australia produces 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions. We’re 16th in the world, after China, the US, the EU, India, Indonesia, Russia, Brazil, Japan, Canada, Germany, Iran, Mexico, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, and South Africa. The top three emitters contribute more than half of total global emissions, the top 10 account for nearly three-quarters. It doesn’t matter what Australia does.

We wrecked our energy advantage for nothing.

You see the stark evidence in the 37 page Powerpoint presentation Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg showed last week to the Coalition party room.

The first slide is a graph of retail electricity prices over time. The soaring trajectory shows Labor’s culpability.

From 2004 to 2007 prices rose about 15 per cent. Then, with Rudd’s election in 2007, the trajectory turned near exponential, a carbon tax kicked in and prices more than doubled.

With the election of the Abbott government in 2013 and the repeal of the carbon tax, prices dipped 20 per cent before rising back to peak levels again in mid-2016, as government subsidies for renewables distorted the market, along with an investment strike on coal, and greenie bans on gas.

Worse still, the more we paid, the less reliable was our energy supply. South Australia is the poster child of Australia’s climate dysfunction, with the most expensive electricity in the country and blackouts which would shame a third world country.

It’s a mess.

Which is why the Turnbull government’s patchwork solution of the National Energy Guarantee unveiled last week is, a master-stoke of pragmatism and common sense.

Frydenberg’s plan effectively ends subsidies for renewables, boosts investment with built in reliability, and could eventually lower prices.

It mandates that electricity retailers in each state provide a minimum percentage of reliable dispatchable power — as in coal and gas or stored energy in hydro or batteries — to avoid blackouts when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

It still gives the Coalition a big point of difference with Labor on which to fight an election. It sticks with the renewable energy target legislated by the Abbott government in 2015 of 23.5 per cent by 2020, which is 95 per cent achieved anyway, while Labor is locked into an unsustainable RET of 50 per cent.

Coal and gas will still be 64-72 per cent of our energy mix in 2030 compared with 39 per cent under Labor.

Much as we would prefer Australia had nothing to do with the Paris climate treaty, again the Abbott government made a commitment in 2015 of a 26 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, and good citizens don’t walk away from deals.

But those reductions can be postponed for a decade while technology advances. Meanwhile, Labor is stuck with a 45 per cent emissions reduction promise.

It is up to the states to endorse the plan at next month’s COAG meeting. But Frydenberg has left them with little choice.

“If a state tries its own RET, any abatement it achieves is simply counted towards achieving the national emissions target. Such a state risks its own reliability for no gain in emissions outcome”.

Frydenberg’s miraculous feat has been to win support from industry and almost universal approval of the party room, which actually broke into applause after his presentation.

If we were starting from scratch we wouldn’t be here. But politics is only the art of the possible, and there are no good options left. We can’t go back to 2007 and unscramble Rudd’s egg.

It’s like making a bad investment. You can wallow in your loss and cry for what might have been. Or you can put it behind you and get on with living.

http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/rendezview/rudds-climate-mess-may-be-frydenbergs-making/news-story/c17daa6b39e141948ba5b79cef251bbb

Rudd...Gillard...Rudd Governments were unmitigated disasters and Australia is still paying the cost of their maniacal economic decisions which gutted our Country finanicially

"champions at wrecking Howard’s legacy". .

Howard's legacy?? My, how fortunate it must be to be able to re-write history.
Would that legacy include a war fought on a lie, and squandered billions from the mining boom??

thecuriousmail wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 8:05am:

And the fake children overboard incident.

thecuriousmail wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 8:05am:

How do you come to that conclusion? He paid off Keatings' $96bn debt, left the country with a $22bn surplus, set up the future fund, introduced the GST, overhauled the taxation system and oversaw a huge increase in private health fund membership that took the pressure off the states' public health systems. If the goal of a PM is to leave government with the country in a better position than when he became PM, then he more than succeeded. By contrast, the Prime Ministerships of Keating, Rudd, Gillard and Rudd 2.0 were unmitigated disasters that saw them leave office with the country in far worse shape than when they commenced their terms.

Wasn't there a GFC or something like that in there somewhere?
You know, the rest of the world including the US and europe going into recession? ::) ::) ::) ::)

stunspore wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 8:09am:

thecuriousmail wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 8:05am:

And the fake children overboard incident.

at least it was FAKE>.. and not the real McCoy we saw after rudd opened our borders! >:( >:(

do you know how many children drowned without life jackets??..

I didnt think you did.... to busy concentrating on the FAKE ones.. >:( >:( >:(

To date, frydenburg has done nothing with the energy portfolio, a mess caused by the libs dogmatic attack on renewables, bought on by their ideological based decision making, no matter what the cost, and their determination to undo everything labor did. The only gain Frydenburg has made so far is to make a laughing stock of himself.

macman wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 9:47am:

Wasn't there a GFC or something like that in there somewhere?
You know, the rest of the world including the US and europe going into recession? ::) ::) ::) ::)

Yes, and it barely affected Australia.

John Smith wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 11:38am:

Look at South Australia where there has been no attacks on renewables. They have, in fact, been embraced by the Labor government there. The result? Blackouts and the highest electricity prices in the world! Yeah, you just shot yourself in the foot with that one. ;D

Armchair_Politician wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 4:15pm:

macman wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 9:47am:

Wasn't there a GFC or something like that in there somewhere?
You know, the rest of the world including the US and europe going into recession? ::) ::) ::) ::)

Yes, and it barely affected Australia.

Why was that?

red baron wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 7:59am:

Rudd...Gillard...Rudd Governments were unmitigated disasters and Australia is still paying the cost of their maniacal economic decisions which gutted our Country finanicially

Go copper internet: your kids must love you ::)

Armchair_Politician wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 8:11am:

thecuriousmail wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 8:05am:

Go COPPER INTERNET: :o what a joke the libs are when it comes to anything but giving assets to their mates!

Armchair_Politician wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 4:16pm:

John Smith wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 11:38am:

Nothing to do with a storm that damaged a large percentage of their infrastructure and back ups that were offline, right fool? :D :D

Armchair_Politician wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 4:15pm:

macman wrote on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 9:47am:

Wasn't there a GFC or something like that in there somewhere?
You know, the rest of the world including the US and europe going into recession? ::) ::) ::) ::)

Yes, and it barely affected Australia.

rubbish. Demand for our products from every other country , except china, died as a result of the GFC.

You might think that's nothing but for most people that's a pretty big something. Or did you think we only export to china? :D :D :D

Quote:

MALCOLM Turnbull had one shot left in the leadership locker and he blew it.

The mere fact that Labor say they’ll support his new energy policy is enough for ordinary Australians to know it’s more about his personal climate change obsessions than them, their power bills and making ends meet.

Recasting Australia’s energy future with a return to reliable, affordable baseload power was the Prime Minister’s last opportunity to take the fight up to Bill Shorten and get back in the game.

Instead, the policy announced this week will be his death warrant.

While government conservatives were busy congratulating themselves on their win in getting Turnbull to dump his preferred clean energy target as well as subsidies for renewables by 2020, the Prime Minister used the complexity of the issue, and a damning lack of detail, to ram through what amounts to an emissions trading scheme via a secondary market amongst energy retailers.

How did they get it so wrong?

It was obvious last Monday night that the fix was on. Prime ministers never turn up to backbench policy committees but it wasn’t just Malcolm Turnbull at the energy policy meeting but the heads of the Australian Energy Market Operator and the Australian Energy Market Commission to present a policy that was said to have been produced by the Energy Security Council. Outgunned and overawed, with a mere two-page document on which to base the most important policy decision of all, backbenchers rubber stamped it after barely an hour.

The following day, at the start of Tuesday’s Coalition party room meeting, the Prime Minister told his MPs there’d be an energy policy presentation from the minister, questions and answers with the same energy policy experts and, then, a political discussion. No policy papers at all were available and the political discussion never happened.

A prime minister who often boasts about “due process” completely failed to give his MPs a chance to ventilate the politics of the most political issue of all — and isn’t the job of the backbencher to ensure retail politics is injected into big decisions?

The masterminds of the new energy policy, Minister for the Environment and Energy Josh Frydenberg and PM Malcolm Turnbull.

The whole thing was a stitch up from the start.

When Tony Abbott rose at 11.15am to begin the promised political discussion, he was not “howled down” by colleagues, as Turnbull media acolytes claimed; he was sat down by the Prime Minister who simply announced that the policy had been approved. Shortly afterwards, at the media conference scheduled just before Question Time, the PM himself was barely across the detail and regularly deferred to his bureaucrats. A glossy brochure was handed out that had obviously been printed days earlier.

Malcolm Turnbull will live to regret this tick-and-flick exercise and his party room will pay for their cowardice at the next election.

Most of them don’t understand the complexity of what they signed Australia up to.

Some have worked it out and are now angry at being treated with contempt especially as more start to understand Mr Turnbull’s “captain’s pick” commits them to a de facto emissions trading scheme.

By the end of Wednesday, Labor frontbenchers were saying that this was a policy they could live with. :o

And why wouldn’t they? The reliability guarantee means the lights will stay on; and the emissions reduction guarantee means that the percentage of renewable power will keep rising.

When prices keep going through the roof, and they will, Bill Shorten will just say it’s all the Coalition’s fault because this is their policy. The chance to make the next election a referendum on power prices has been lost.

Make no mistake, this policy won’t reduce prices.

The government’s rationale for the claim that prices would fall $115 a year by 2020 was the increased investment and the greater supply that “policy certainty” is supposed to bring.

With prices going up in many households by at least $100 a quarter, and with nine quarters before this new scheme starts in 2020, we’ll cop increases of $900 plus to save $115.

It doesn’t add up and that’s why there’s no modelling.

Even the minister said that modelling in his area makes astrology look reliable. They could print the glossy brochure and have the TV ads ready to go but they couldn’t release the economic modelling? Clearly something doesn’t add up.

know the energy issue is complex and charlatans play on complexity in the hope that ordinary people just switch off. But if there’s one issue that will determine our economic future, this is it so everyone must be prepared to hold our politicians to account.

In the short term, the only way to cut price is to get more gas into the system. In the longer term, the only way is to have more reliable baseload power.

That means more coal-fired power stations as supported by Queensland Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls.

Overseas, there’s around 1400 next generation High Efficiency Lower Emission coal-fired power stations in operation and about the same number again being built.

But not here in Australia where the coal they use comes from; it’s just madness.

Quote:

Like so much else, Turnbull’s energy plan is a conspiracy by the insiders against the outsiders.

It’s climate change zealots putting reducing emissions ahead of reducing price regardless of the impact on cost of living, jobs, and Australia’s future as a country that makes things.

If MPs living beyond the inner city, and frontbenchers with spine, had considered this properly, that’s the conclusion they would have come to — which is why Turnbull never allowed them to see the detail or have the political debate and that’s the whole reason we elect them to sit in a room and make decisions for us.

Back in 2013, the Coalition was elected to reduce spending, to cut taxes and to end Labor’s climate change obsessions.

Now, the government is increasing spending, hiking taxes and introducing a Labor-lite emissions reduction policy. As long as there is no point to this government — despite the awfulness of the alternative — it is doomed whenever the next election comes.

I can't believe you fell for Turnbulls shims and mirrors AP

he's just lost the Next Election...

he's also signed Australia's manufacturing death warrant

Geez them Lefties don't want to be reminded of the six sick years of Labor's Socialist waste and disgrace when they nearly ruined the Australian economy with their imbecilic economic incompetence.

And nothing's changed - Labor is still a pile of junk and they want to RESTART the BOATS!!!!

Australian Politics Forum
http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl General Discussion >> Federal Politics >> Rudd's mess is Frydenburg's gain http://www.ozpolitic.com/forum/YaBB.pl?num=1508622618 Message started by Armchair_Politician on Oct 22^nd, 2017 at 7:50am